skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one that's concerned about the environmental footprint of this publicity stunt? We've come so far to have disposable cell phones! With a processor and camera that are more powerful than available consumer electronics 10 years ago. And now we put them in dead tree magazines just to display some trivial tweets and to be thrown away a few weeks later? Sure, I'm tempted to get one just to play with it, but there's this other voice in my head saying that this is a whole new level of crazy.

I sincerely hope this is some kind of recycling effort? But then, how did they get the same recycled phone model in large numbers? Maybe a production run that was completed before a model was taken off the market?
What is Charmin going to put in their Facebook feed that has recurring value? New research on the best way to wipe your ass? I'll continue to get that from charmin.com, rather than risk a charmin app that posts to my wall that tells people I just learned how to wipe my ass.
If it were a traditional class at a traditional school you'd just assume they actually learned it?
Bullied anchor responds on air. October is National Anti-Bullying month.
As the voltage across the gas increases, at some point it causes electrons to leave their valence orbits and travel through the gas (the gas becomes a plasma). That's a "breakdown" if the threshold-crossing causes a sudden, abrupt increase in overall current in the gas, and if the system has a negative resistance trait (one in which the relationship between voltage and current contradicts the usual expectations).

The idea in this case is that the photoelectric effect (Einstein) also can cause an electron to leave its valence orbit. Therefore if the voltage in the gas is high enough to almost cause a breakdown or "avalanche", any extra electrons released by photon interactions may trigger the avalanche in advance of the time it might otherwise have happened.

So you have the possibility of an avalanche caused by the electric field, and you also have some electrons liberated by the photoelectric effect. The breakdown point is determined by both populations, not just one.
Just from reading the summary this is really great. Steve Jobs did a lot for computing and for software. I'm an Android "fanboy" and I really hate what Apple is doing these days, but his contribution to digital life today was significant and undeniable.
Andreessen On Facebook Monetization: Successful Companies Defer Gratification
"Copyright was never about rights holders making money."

Here's a quote from the Statute of Anne:

"Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:"

Also copyright doesn't protect ideas.

Also the "high quality ideas (and shit)" are not free. High quality work is expensive, but may be free to you because they are subsidised. A model not without its problems.
Using fake traffic to promote your game?
Feds Persist with EO Talk, Despite Being Pwn3d
How to get more customers with less spend
I'm guessing this is only in the U.S.?
I still believe that imperative is the best paradigm to start programming. I.e. once you understand all the subtleties of for/while and branching, you can undertand a list comprehension as an abstraction on top of that, applicable for certain situations. In that light I think OP's tool is exactly what one needs to get going.

A similar approach for those mounting towards FP would be certainly nice though, but it would have a completely different target demographic. Also it seems to me that languages like Haskell and F# are better for just learning FP.
Any pointers/examples on using state charts?

I've seen custom state machine compilers for tricky code (not limited to parser generators)... but I don't have much familiarity with the term "state charts".

I find functional code goes a long way... a lot further than most people think. And then I try to capture all side effects in objects instantiated in main(). That makes them easy to isolate and scale later.

I like some of their arguments about relational modeling vs. hierarchical modeling... not sure about the implications in my own code yet.

Werner Vogels has a pithy headline "Life is not a State Machine"... I think too many people have yet to internalize that. An individual program is always a state machine, but a distributed system is not in general. You can force it to be one by using full Paxos everywhere, but that's limiting yourself to a very narrow subset of all possible distributed systems.

So there is something fundamental about state machines and scaling. There is probably an impossibility result somewhere about this.
>Everything is just numbers flying around.

A number is just a representation. It is really a possibility that is being passed around. 'c', 99, 0x63, these are all just mappings from the permutation of '01100011'. If you think of it as a "number", then you will be surprised when there is overflow/underflow, or implementation issues with floating points. It is NOT numbers that are flying around, it is just high and low charges. This abstraction is very leaky. If you understand that all of the state of memory in a computer is one very long list of zeroes and ones, then a pointer is a list of zeroes and ones that encodes a location in the list. The reason why teaching pointers, floating point numbers, integer overflows and so forth are confusing to people is that they have been inculcated with abstractions that are wrong. Computation (in hardware and in theory) is one of the few things that can be taught axiomatically and doing so avoids many of the confusions and sticking points that learners encounter.

I do not think people should start with a machine model (necessarily) directly, but they should understand it by the time they are learning pointers.
1. Growing by what measure? When I was at Drupalcon 2012 there was a large amount of discussion about how the community wasn't growing and was the same people every year. And I seriously don't mean to be a dick, but passion doesn't equal technical competence. You don't have to be a gifted programmer to understand quality, and understand that Drupal lacks it.

2. There are user groups, I've been to them. They're mostly full of people who have basic problems and a few exasperated and grizzly veterans who offer arcane solutions to non-arcane problems "use last night's dev version of the module, sure it's ok to put php in the database... And the community of drupal.org might exist, but if you can sort it out from the convoluted UX mess that is drupal.org, good luck.

3. Is that supposed to be a feature? In theory, you can get ridiculous amounts of things done if you happen to know the arcane way to combine 30 different checkboxes and twelve different modules. How is this by any objective measure better than writing code? Code is expressive, documentable, concise. Checkboxes and UI interactions are not.

4. This is hardly a unique feature. The same can be said about wordpress, rails, django, etc (at least if you use webfaction)

I don't think you can argue under any objective measure that wordpress is more difficult to deal with than drupal. It has many of the same issues as drupal (feature management), but the ease of theming and documentation are lightyears ahead. It's also quite a bit more limited.
Yeah, that happens to me to. I need there to be a system that says "We've never seen that ID before! Do you want to link it to some other account?"

Which means maybe you should have a separate button for "I want to create an account here" and "I want to log in again here". I know that's heretical to the OpenID community, but I usually know whether or not I have some account on a site, but I usually don't know whether I typed in my openID url or hit the Google button.
From the headline: 33 Percent Of Google Users Will Use Bing More After ‘Bing It On’ Challenge

From the article: 33% said they would use Bing more often after taking the Challenge

Two very different statements IMO - how many of those 33% are ever actually going to think about it again rather than just reverting to their old habits?
WTF? A search page on Bing includes:
* image search results
* a 300 pixel wide column on the RHS for linking your Facebook account to retrieve Facebook results
* News search
* "Related searches"
* "Trends to talk about"
If a text based submission gets above some threshold (points, user
history, replies, ...), parse the links in the submission. If
the submission gets any flags, then stop parsing the links.

Also, rendering text normally (black) rather than grayed-out when a text
based submission gets above some threshold would be beneficial.

Sure, parsing links on text based submissions will allow manipulative
people to put their comment in a privileged position, but the current
implementation detracts from discussion. For example, it's typical to
see a follow-up reply for the sole purpose of having clickable links,
but due to reply ranking, one usually finds the reply too late. Another
issue is mobile devices where a copy-and-paste of a plain text URL is
painful.

Obviously, I don't know the stats necessary to grasp whether or not
you're fighting with flag-bots or even users who flag too aggressively,
but I know you have code running to deal with these two issues (you
publicly mentioned how the weighting works eons ago). Since you have the
capacity to roughly determine good flagging from bad, a single good flag
should be enough to reverse the decision to parse links. This should be
enough stop the "privileged positioning" problem.

As for combating the "link harvesting/spamming" side of problem, I think
the most you could do is mark the parsed links as "nofollow" in the text
based submissions (as usual). It's not a perfect solution, but it's
still better than nothing, and it's equivalent to how you handle link
based submissions.
Could not agree with you more. I have seen some excellent content on Quora, but since I do not use these other social services I haven't been able to engage with the site -- even though I was interested.
Also curious about this. I'm writing something with a DAG storage scheme similar to git, currently using SHA-256 to hash blobs. Been thinking about switching to SHA-512, but there's no rush as I can easily switch hash functions anytime before initial public release. How much time/what indicators can I look for before considering a switch to SHA-3?
Facebook nowadays asks you to confirm the permissions you're granting to another site, and if you give timeline-post permissions, then it asks what privacy level the posts should be. I always mark "Private: nobody but me can see those posts." Problem solved.
Hmm, that is a fair question. I think I would give more weight to a class if they took it when they didn't have to, rather than having taken is a part of a requirement for a degree.
But those are still low res (1366x768), right?

The only ultrabooks I can find with high res screen at the moment are either made by Asus or Sony. I've heard good things about the Asus UX31/32, full HD IPS displays (1920x1080) in a 13.3 inch laptop. A 12 inch laptop with 1600x900 would probably be ideal for me.
You talk like these were the only 2 to 3 strangers that ever followed him, that only trolls followed him. Was that the case? How are you to distinguish between legitimate followers and not?

The whole OP reads like a string of conjectures just like this one. I kept waiting for some firsthand knowledge of the matter, some smoking gun, but mostly it was a lot of innuendo and assumption.

There's just not a lot of "there" there. It sounds more like an assemblage of facts to fit a theory rather than the other way around.
Ask HN: Does spammy self-promotion drown out real hacker news?
I've noticed that a lot of interesting news submissions never make the homepage. I think it's because a lot of companies post a blog entry that's really just pumping their own brand and get all the employees to vote it up. Meanwhile, the interesting news post doesn't have the manufactured upvotes so gets lost in the shuffle. My former company even figured out how to game the system and get by vote filters (it's fairly simple).

Looking at the HN homepage now, many are what I would consider blatant self-promotion and border on spammy. Granted, I have no problem with someone wanting feedback on their site or offering a really in-depth look at internal technology (e.g., this is how we handle failover and scale to 1MM uniques/day), but a lot of companies just manufacture reasons to blog solely to boost traffic (company memo: thanks for the blog ideas and upvoting our post, HN gave us 10K hits today! good leads!).

HN page as of now (50% are self-promotion, several IMO are legit):
1. Neural Networks for Machine Learning (coursera.org)
3. Keccak wins the SHA-3 competition (nist.gov)
5. Show HN: I built a stock market game based on the top 50,000 websites (linkdaq.net)
8. Lockitron: Keyless entry using your phone (lockitron.com)
9. Software on Steam (steampowered.com)
12. Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It (mailchimp.com)
16. Online Python Tutor: Learn programming by visualizing code execution (pythontutor.com)
18. How We Doubled Our Android Install Rate in One Hour (dwellable.com)
20. Show HN: Meet your cardboard buddy. (foldable.me)
21. Filepicker.io launches Alfresco, WebDAV, & FTP integrations (filepicker.io)
22. Show HN: Summaries of interesting content, written by people (tldr.io)
24. Lead Product Engineering at OrderAhead
27. How to Model Viral Growth: The Hybrid Model (linkedin.com)
29. Meet the 2012 MacArthur Fellows (macfound.org)
1) "after an independent survey"
What independent survey?

2) Apparently 33% of Google Users are also liars.
It's a Facebook page, not an app, so they won't post things to your wall. It seems they have contests and media on their page, as well as coupons. Those things will show on 300,000 Facebook newsfeeds. I'd say it's better to drive traffic to their Facebook page rather than http://www.charmin.com/ .
I'm doing the Computational Finance class via Coursera at the moment, and I've done a number of other courses previously.

I agree the programming assignments in the Finance class tend to be too simple. Most of the code is literally handed to you, you just have to understand it well enough to change it. I also understand that even that can be a major challenge if you don't have the background for it.

But I'm choosing to see the class itself as a starting point. It's a framework for my own explorations into the topics. I can do the minimum and get the minimum out of it. Or I can use what's provided as a base and go further.

The Coursera Algorithms class, for example. Writing code that got the answer was relatively easy, so once that step was done it became about optimizing the code for my own learning benefit.

It's like any educational process, you get our what you put in.
I don't personally find achievements motivating, but a lot of people do. That same mechanism can be a powerful force for motivating people to learn and gain mastery over software that they might never otherwise have gained.

I'm occasionally frustrated that I don't know how to do lots of things in Photoshop and Illustrator, for example, but don't have enough incentive to learn how to do them. While I don't think achievements would work for me, there are undoubtedly many people in a similar situation for many kinds of software that it would work for.
In my experience knowing people who have chosen both ways (not the same person of course), watching for knives is a sad sad way to live.
I took the course in the spring, and found it interestng, and the programmin assignments fairly easy. This summer I took the ML course that Caltech offered, which was significantly more challenging (the homework assignments were multiple choice, but they often required writing substantial code, without any starter code.) The Caltech course is now available on iTunes U...
That Bing It On challenge fails to disguise Google's results to me. Tons of Youtube links, and the styling on the image results part is always Google-y.
For the computer science entry:

Daniel Spielman, Yale University Professor

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/
risking getting too deep in the mud, saying things are all of them at once is not correct. You can treat most sections of memory as executable, numerical, textual or otherwise, but that does not make them so. For instance, control code points in ASCII are not text, they are an in-band control mechanism. NULL is not text; not in the way most people's working definitions of text would implicate. The fact that there are abstractions upon binary sequences are matters of convention and occasionally hardware implementation. Teaching that there are meaningful layers of abstraction is part of having a consistent (sound) understanding of the computer.
Apparently Bing's press release didn't state what proportion of people found Bing to be better than Google, or even what proportion found it better-or-equal.

If those statistics had been favorable, they would assuredly have been reported.

(Note: Bing's blog post http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... does mention the 2-to-1 preference claim again, but that's from a previously commissioned study, not from the Bing It On Challenge.)
Superman-Strength Bacteria Produce 24-Karat Gold
What I respect the most from him is his persistence. I think most people wouldn't really have that strength to go back to the company who fired them, and revive them from near bankruptcy, and do the things they dreamed about a long time ago.

That's very respectable.
"Apple is spending too much time fighting legal battles instead of market battles" ...all of which are proxy battles with Google.
Alfresco and FTP I get, but why WebDAV? I cannot think of anything which still uses this protocol, no service nor enterprise deployment.
While it is odd, it is steam's built in feed back mechanism. Dev's get notified of them and can track user progress. They use them in games for post release analysis of what users found hard and such. Bringing that concept to app software will hopefully help show which are the 20% of features used by 80% of their customers, or rough spots that could be smoothed.
> Neural Networks are gradually taking over from simpler Machine Learning methods

And haven't SVMs and such gradually taken over from Neural Networks?
Why doctest.js is better than Python’s doctest
Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.

________

[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2
I think you're thinking about this a bit backwards.

In the study of e.g. prediction markets, the idea is that if the price is too low, lots of people will try to buy it. Then the price gets raised up to compensate. If the price is too high, lots of people will try to sell it, and the price gets lowered to compensate.

What all this means is that the traders don't learn info from you, you learn info from them. You shouldn't have to put any information into the prices. If you have a supply/demand matching algorithm, then the prices will give you the information.
Same result here. I wonder if Bing is better for the non-techie crowd.
Seems like the biggest value from top tier MBA programs is the peer/alumni network. Coursework is very much a second-class citizen to networking (at least in the programs my friends have attended).

Edit: Not to disparage the post, which does seem like a good list of business books.
Making Big Data Dance
The question didn't seem rude to me at all, either. Why is plain communication so often taken as cynicism/sarcasm?
You've missed the point entirely.

If I told you I had a sandwich the other day, your skepticism meter wouldn't suddenly kick in. You wouldn't ask me how much I paid or intimate that I don't know what a sandwich is. If I told you a crazy guy yelled at me on the bus in the city, you wouldn't ask me whether maybe I misunderstood, or start going through my social network postings to confirm/deny that I took the bus to work the other day.

Yet suddenly you're skeptical when someone claims to have experienced discrimination or bigotry, you're full speed ahead on skepticism? Take nothing as given? Come on.

This might not apply to you personally, but that dynamic is why the term was invented. Esp. with white male nerds, they find their skepticism often, it seems, when minorities, et al, talk about experiences outside the typical white male's.
If only MS would invest more into improving their products and less on advertising, then they might not even have to advertise. Google's search wasn't really advertised, it was just the best -- so naturally, users flocked to it.

I really think at this point that MS is just trying to outright buy market share with these elaborate campaigns.
I'm positive they wouldn't complain about not getting to retake quizzes after getting poor grades.

My experience is that students everywhere complain about grading. I've never been to Stanford, but I've attended and worked at several other top tier universities.
For some reason I got the feeling that he doesn't want to tell the whole story and wants to hide some stuff. I understand completely, because it's only a Reddit AMA. I enjoyed Mark Zuckerberg's story more in 'The Accidental Billionaire'.
The developers he(?) is mocking use PHP because it's the only tool they know. He, supposedly, uses PHP because he has decided it's ease of use (and deployability) make it better than the other tools he knows for the projects he's working on. I don't think this is hard to figure out from what he's written here.
My apologies for having a very US-centric view-- it's all I know. The US Constitution says: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I have a problem with how the law has been twisted by the copyright industry to render "limited Times" to mean a virtual eternity. Fix that and I have no beef with copyright. The public domain is important and needs to be nourished. The "Founders' copyright", with respect to duration, has been shown by multiple studies to be more than sufficient to create economic incentive while, at the same time, not starving the public domain.
>the word "function" entails "operation", which entails "time"

Pure functions do not. Pure functions are relations from a domain to a codomain, implying a "mapping", but not an "operation", which I believe implies change. This mapping (from the domain to the codomain) can be presented as a subset of the cartesian product of the domain by the codomain (which you allude to.) This is devoid of any notion of "time".
One thing that has been really interested about the discussion of social logins has been the re-emerging critical outlook on online identity. I think that social logins are a double-edged sword, where they give us the ability to easily connect with sites for which our social identity is relevant or for which setting up a whole new custom identity is unnecessary. One the other hand, the obvious drawback is the implicit promotion of the social network as the de facto identity standard, which is dangerous and totalitarian (Facebook owns who you are, sort of).

I think the simple value for social login is context. There's an obvious overuse case and a useful use case.
http://www.feedsapi.com

http://olark.com

Google storage
All I could think about was that Li-ion battery should a) be recycled, and b) not in the paper recycling bin, where this magazine will probably end up.
You should have an unused M-PCIE slot then.